Rush Limbaugh has been expecting liberals to start "whining" about the $5000 fine undocumented immigrants will have to pay to gain citizenship under the new immigration bill, but most liberals have been too busy chortling about the immigration-induced split in the GOP to make their own case against the bill. So let a mighty whine rise over the land: Undocumented workers shouldn't be fined; they should get a hefty bonus!

All right, they committed a "crime"--the international equivalent of breaking and entry. But breaking and entry is usually a prelude to a much worse crime, like robbery or rape. What have the immigrants been doing once they get into the US? Taking up time on the elliptical trainers in our health clubs? Getting ahead of us on the wait-lists for elite private nursery schools?

In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have a word for it--trabajo. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.

The punitive rage directed at illegal immigrants grows out of a larger blindness to the manual labor that makes our lives possible: The touching belief, in the class occupied by Rush Limbaugh among many others, that offices clean themselves at night and salad greens spring straight from the soil onto one's plate.

Native-born workers share in this invisibility, but it's far worse in the case of immigrant workers, who are often, for all practical purposes, nameless. In the recent book There's No José Here: Following the Lives of Mexican Immigrants, Gabriel Thompson cites a construction company manager who says things like, "I've got to get myself a couple of Josés for this job if we're going to have that roof patched up by Saturday." Forget the Juans, Diegos, and Eduardos - they're all interchangeable "Josés."

Hence no doubt the ease with which some prominent immigrant-bashers forget their own personal reliance on immigrant labor, like Nevada's Governor Jim Gibbons, who, it turns out, once employed an undocumented nanny. And as the Boston Globe revealed late last year, Mitt Romney's lawn in suburban Boston was maintained by illegal immigrants from Guatemala.

The only question is how much we owe our undocumented immigrant workers. First, those who do not remain to enjoy the benefits of old age in America will have to be reimbursed for their contributions to Medicare and Social Security, and here I quote the website of the San Diego ACLU:

Undocumented immigrants annually pay an estimated $7 billion more than they take out into Social Security, and $1.5 billion more into Medicare.... A study by the National Academy of Sciences also found that tax payments generated by immigrants outweighed any costs associated with services used by immigrants.

Second, someone is going to have to calculate what is owed to "illegals" for wages withheld by unscrupulous employers: The homeowner who tells his or her domestic worker that the wage is actually several hundred dollars a month less than she had been promised, and that the homeowner will be "holding" it for her. Or the landscaping service that stiffs its undocumented workers for their labor. Who's the "illegal" here?

Third, there's the massive compensation owed to undocumented immigrants for preventable injuries on the job. In her book Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights, Jennifer Gordon reports such gruesome cases as a Honduran who died from inhaling paint while sanding yachts in Long Island and a Guatemalan worker whose boss intentionally burned him with hot pans of oil for not washing dishes fast enough. "Death rates for Latino workers," Gordon reports, "have risen over the past decade even as workplace fatality rates for non-Latinos have fallen."

When our debt to America's undocumented workers is eventually tallied, I'm confident that it will be well in excess of the $5000 fine the immigration bill proposes. There is still the issue of the original "crime." If someone breaks into my property for the purpose of trashing and looting, I would be hell-bent on restitution. But if they break in for the purpose of cleaning it--scrubbing the bathroom, mowing the lawn--then, in my way of thinking anyway, the debt goes in the other direction.

****Undocumented workers shouldn't be fined; they should get a hefty bonus!*****

In the first paragraph she proves Rush's point. The dems & elite republicans say it's not amnesty because there is a fine and she is admitting there should be no fine. For all practical purposes the pro-amnesty people should just argue for the merging of the US & Mexico.

This is not over yet. Bush refuses to give up this easily. It's his stubborn character. He will try to resurrect it and call it something else. We have to keep our guard up. We need to keep the pressure up.

STAGE TWO is to go after the people who hire illegals. Start giving them fines and arresting them. Just catch ten or 100 of them on the nightly news. The magnet will dry up and most of the 12 million will go home by themselves.

As an addendum, we should anonymously call the IRS, people working "off the books" means taxes ain't being paid. Make anonymous fliers and hang them around the neighborhood, name names. It's time to embarrass these bustards, whether they give to the GOP or Rats, we don't need them.

CALL! CALL! CALL! CALL! AND KEEP CALLING TILL THE LINES FRY!

WRITE! WRITE! WRITE! WRITE! TILL YOU RUN OUT OF INK IN YOUR PEN!

Bombard the Democrats as well, especially the ones that ran on an anti illegal immigration plank and the ones in marginal districts who could be vulnerable. keep pounding on them. This is a bipartisan issue not a Conservative or Liberal issue BUT AN AMERICAN issue.

In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have a word for it--trabajo. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.

Emergency rooms in this country are packed will illegals getting free medical service that I have to subsidize by extremely high premiums on my health care. They can buy a home (for some unknown reason) where I'm told I make too much money for any assistance, but have too high of debt to qualify for a loan. They receive public assistance (welfare) and food stamps while driving around in vehicles that are new or nearly new (while I'm driving a vehicle that's eight years old). They are sending billions of the dollars they earn illegally in this country back to Mexico or Central American or Asia, or wherever they are from (which means that money is taken out of our economy). No, we do not owe them - they owe us and big time at that.

10
posted on 06/12/2007 8:28:23 PM PDT
by SoldierDad
(Proud Father of a 2nd BCT 10th Mountain Soldier fighting the terrorists in the Triangle of Death)

Their kids get free dental care through the schools! I have to pay for my kids’ dental care. They get free lunches and breakfasts, EVEN DURING SCHOOL VACATIONS. How do I know all this? My Olde English name can be Hispanic looking (with an accent on the silent E) and we have received packets from the local schools, all written in Spanish, telling us what we have been approved for. Which our income would disqualify us for, but surely there are some like us who don’t qualify but still collect.

Ehrenreich is currently an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She also serves on the NORML Board of Directors. And she writes for one of those news magazines no one reads any more. In short, a pot smoking socialist who writes the kind of crap the Nation publishes, which is why no one reads it, either, except for socialist college professors.

27
posted on 06/12/2007 8:37:03 PM PDT
by 3AngelaD
(They screwed up their own countries so bad they had to leave, and now they're here screwing up ours)

“They’ve been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.”

ALL OF WHICH have traditionally summer and/or entry-level jobs FOR OUR OWN AMERICAN-CITIZEN kids......these jobs were essential for the development of the work ethic and everything else rooted in a good and well-developed work-ethic that has served America so very well for more than 2 centuries!

Id like to know if she would be willing to repeat this article after having spent a week in a roomful of 15 illegal aliens...all men...all men who have no compunction whatsoever about using her as a recepticle. Men who are here illegally and know that they will be provided cover after having so abused her.

I wish there were some way of making Lefties live the vapid utopian elitist lies they make up for the rest of us. I wish it with all my heart. There's no better punishment for a Lefty than to make them live the hell they concoct for people they deem lesser than themselves.

Ask yourself what you owe that poor burglar who broke into your home last night. He had worked so conscientiously, going through three rooms from top to bottom, before you awoke to catch him in the act. SURELY he deserves at least that wide screen TV and that one piece of jewelry. Come on. That was hours of effort. Show some humanity.

In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have a word for it--trabajo. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.

Vile hypocrisy.

On the one hand, socialists argue that an individual owes income taxes on the income he makes, because the individual who worked to earn that income is obligated to "give back" to society in exchange for society having made it possible for him to have earned the income in the first place.

Now, out of the other side their mouths, they argue that society owes the members of one of their favored groups for having done useful work (for which those individuals have already earned an income based on the market's valuation of their contributions.)

So which is it? Does society owe you something for the work you do--above and beyond the wage or other payment you have agreed to accept, or do you owe society for the privilege of having been able to work to earn an income?

All right, they committed a “crime”—the international equivalent of breaking and entry. But breaking and entry is usually a prelude to a much worse crime, like robbery or rape.

Hey Barb! How about felonies? That is what document fraud is...a felony. How about plain old theft? Everytime they send their children to school, use the emergency room, cash in WIC or food stamps, go home to their subsidized housing, they are stealing straight from an American Taxpayer’s pocket.
I consider those to be crimes.

Ask yourself what you owe that poor burglar who broke into your home last night. He had worked so conscientiously, going through three rooms from top to bottom, before you awoke to catch him in the act. SURELY he deserves at least that wide screen TV and that one piece of jewelry. Come on. That was hours of effort. Show some humanity.

Illegals make up 4.4% of the workforce according to the US Dept of Labor. They make about 2.2% of the GDP for America. The rest of GDP is done by the real backbone of the US economy which is the legal worker!

Also, if illegals payed more into the system than they took out, they wouldn't need the system.

46
posted on 06/12/2007 8:46:01 PM PDT
by pulaskibush
(USA, founded by tolerant Christians. USSR, founded by intolerant Secularist.)

Barbara is clueless (I know, we didnt need this piece to discover that). She conveniently forgets all the costs such as courts, prisons, educating their children, school lunches, WIC services and food for pregnant women, infants, and children, and translators.

Take the last item. If a hospital spends 150K a year on translators, that’s money it can’t spend elswhere. That the kind of money could probably buy valuable medical equipment. She is so wrong to take these tradeoffs so lightly.

"In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have a word for it--trabajo. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking."

What a bunch of crap. What about the car thieving, the break and entering (not the "into the country" crap this article leads off with) the rape of women, drug smuggling, murdering, latino gang violence, prostitution rings, defrauding government social programs, defrauding or just plain theft of medical treatment, identity theft,-and the list goes on and on,- 99% of these criminals commit, not to mention tax evasion, and voting illegaly for idiotic sympathizers that they KNOW are stupid clueless suckers.

We owe them alright, we owe them a brief moment to stand before a judge, who will tell them the crimes they have committed, and explain to them why they will never be alowed to enter this country again. Then we owe them a paper towel to wipe the ink off their fingers after they are fingerprinted and photographed. We owe them a bottle of water to drink after we drop them off at the SOUTHERNMOST MEXICAN BORDER which will ensure they don't walk back across the USA/Mexican border the next day.

I personally know of a number of situations that rag heads have come into our country and received a $50,000 check from Uncle Sam and a wet kiss just to give them hands-up to get a good start. This is, of course, tax free and will probably never be paid back to the government. But, hell, that’s okay. We, as citizens, in the country, could and will never get such a helping hand. Can anyone else give me their opinion about this??

50
posted on 06/12/2007 8:50:39 PM PDT
by antiunion person
(The more we help, the more they steal from us.)

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